It isn’t the city-state under the thrall of the witch-king. It isn’t the monster-filled dungeon with traps and riddles and treasure. Traveling is inherently the least interesting part of the adventure. The problem is that, on the one hand, traveling from point A to point B is inherently the least interesting part of the adventure. The point is, heroes spend a lot of time traveling between point A and point B through the wilderness. Right? And even if the story isn’t in some dungeon miles from town, the heroes might have to get to some other city or village or town miles away. Which explains why people haven’t cleaned it out before. But the story itself actually takes place in a dungeon that isn’t in the city or town or village.
The heroes of your story generally live in some kind of city or town or village. I would credit you all by name, but I’ve run out of paragraphs and I have to start an article now.
Thanks to the six or seven of you who wrote in questions about it. All I do is take off the part where I say “Dumba$&% Name Asks: Hey, what about travel time?” and I replace it with a three paragraph Long, Rambling Introduction™.Īnd so, with that third paragraph closed, let’s talk about overland travel in fantasy RPGs. It deserves for me to squirt out an Ask Angry, but disguise it as a Feature Article. Enough so that it deserves more than just squirting out an Ask Angry (my Phone-It-In solution when I don’t want to write an ACTUAL article). Hey, speaking of things that are easy to plan, tedious to execute, and involve no choices at all, several people have asked me about overland travel in RPGs. Once you get in the car, on the day of the trip, you’re trapped. Which probably explains why it’s so easy to BUY tickets and PLAN a trip. And the game of “will my baggage actually get to the same place I did?” So, now that I really think about it, it’s amazing that anyone travels anywhere at all. And, to be honest, I find having to remove my belt and shoes and get nude photgraphs taken by a machine emitting God-knows-what radiation directly into my gonads, I find all of that far, FAR less offensive than having to stand in line for TWO F$&%ING HOURS for the privilege. But then, you actually have to GET to the airport and BOARD by getting through airport f$&%ing security. Getting the plane tickets, booking the train, reserving a car and a hotel? Those are easy as f$&%. It’s amazing how easy it is to PLAN TO TRAVEL across the f$&%ing world. In about ten minutes, I found inexpensive round trip tickets for exactly the dates I wanted. And so, the other day, I found myself using one of those aggregation sites to search through all the flights available to take me home from my current residence in the cutest little pretend city in the entire Midwest, a city that is almost just like a real city, the best the poor little Midwest can actually manage, Chicago. For example, in January, I make an annual pilgrimage to the land of my birth, the best damned state in the best damned country on the best damned planet in the Universe, New York, U. When you think about it, it’s really amazing how easy it is to travel across the f$&%ing world. But I already did the whole thing so you get an extra special, extra long article that is half crunch. In retrospect, it should have been two separate articles – theory and implementation – and if not for the last minute rewrite, it would have been. So the second half of this article is basically a barebones system for resolving wilderness travel in D&D and Pathfinder. But then, I went out to dinner and realized that I could do a much better job of codifying things. I had filled it with vague suggestions for handling this and that aspect of wilderness travel. And that’s because of an eleventh hour rewrite. A quick note: this article ballooned out to be extra super long.
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